The other night at the opening of Mikhail Baryshnikov’s photo exhibition, “Merce My Way,” at 401 Projects on West Street, we were ruminating on the rapidly changing schneigborhood with gallery owner Mark Seliger. “You just blink and there’s a new building up," said Seliger, adding that he is often asked to sell his building, just south of the Richard Meier condos. He wasn't entirely sold on Julian Schnabel’s nearby Palazzo Chupi, he admitted, at least not until he went inside. “It’s amazing," he declared. “It’s growing on me, definitely growing on me." Another local, Michael Angelo, proprietor of supermodel-central salon Wonderland on West 13th Street, chimed in. “I think that everybody had a little heart attack at first," he said of the pink palazzo.
Seliger recently photographed the entire Schnabel family for a L’Uomo Vogue spread. Papa Schnab, he said, had insisted on wearing his own clothing. “You can count on him wearing pajamas, that’s for sure,” he said.
And then, as if he were a rotund, benevolent Beetlejuice, at the sound of his name, Schnabel appeared.

Every once in a while, The Wall Street Journal renews our faith in the Street and, indeed, humanity by profiling one of the few eccentric and wonderful folks who float among or above the wretched, amoral meatheads, and Andrew J. Hall is such a man. The British-born commodities trader and head of a "secretive unit" at Citigroup known as Phibro, 57-year-old Hall has made a killing in the last few years off long-term oil futures, the Journal tells us, and this is despite the fact that, most afternoons, he leaves the office to row or practice calisthenics with a ballet teacher. He's also one of the world's top collectors of contemporary art — not that his neighbors in Southport, Connecticut, were particularly impressed by that when he tried to install an 80-foot-long concrete sculpture on the lawn of his Greek Revival home. Hall ended up giving Etroits sont les Vaisseaux to the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, which is too bad because it would have looked nice on the lawn at Schloss Dernberg, the nearly 1,000-year-old castle he owns in Germany. But his material possessions aren't the only reason we would like Hall to procure the necessary papers to adult-adopt us. According to the Journal, "He recently staged a lavish exhibit in his German castle of works by U.S. artist and filmmaker Julian Schnabel." In the book accompanying the show, Hall opined that "many in the art world have tried to ignore" Mr. Schnabel, despite his obvious awesomeness. See? He's a man after our own heart. Trader Hits Jackpot in Oil, As Commodity Boom Roars On [WSJ]
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